A newly issued report titled "Caring for Vulnerable Elders During a
Disaster: National Findings of the 2007 Nursing Home Hurricane Summit,"
contains ten agreed upon key recommendations to improve how frail and
elderly citizens are cared for during a major disaster.

The report, funded by the John A. Hartford Foundation, is a result
of two years of research and two planning summits where state, federal,
and local emergency planning teams, including representatives from
FEMA, CMS, and HHS, shared information and ideas with nursing home
leadership.

"We all agree that integrating the needs of the elderly into
regional emergency planning processes can save lives." said LuMarie
Polivka-West of the Florida Healthcare Association, which convened the
Hurricane Summits of 2006 and 2007 that led to the development of the
report. "Now, with a greater understanding of everyone's needs, we have
developed better solutions to care for our most vulnerable citizens."

The CDC determined that the elderly accounted 70 percent of the
deaths in New Orleans from Hurricane Katrina, with at least 139
storm-related fatalities having occurred in nursing homes.

Some of the key recommendations include:

Nursing homes must be incorporated into disaster response systems at all levels--national, state, and local.

Disaster response systems, including Emergency Operations Centers
(EOCs), must designate nursing homes as "health care" facilities. These
facilities must receive the same priority status for restoration of
utilities (e.g., power, phone service) as hospitals, and may need
enhanced police protection during community recovery.

Shelter in place, when possible, and harden the physical plant to withstand hurricane winds and provide emergency power.

Long-term care providers must know their storm surge/flood zone,
the capacity of the facility's infrastructure to withstand hurricane
winds, and must develop viable plans for evacuation or sheltering in
place in accordance with their facility's risk.

Woodbury College has announced the addition
of a master of science in law degree, designed to help non-law
professionals gain legal knowledge and skills to enhance their
marketability. College President Larry Mandell announced the new program this week. Woodbury's
M.S. in law will be the nation's only fully online program that focuses
on managerial, human resource, elder and health law. The program will
eqiup human resource workers, health professionals and educators with
knowledge in the areas of contracts, employment law,the administrative
and regulatory dimensions of their work, liability and privacy and
other constitutional issues. Mandell says the program also has
special value for foreign attorneys and foreign business executives who
want to understand the American legal system, and for paralegals who
want advanced training and an advanced degree.

New Census data show that in 2006, both
the number and the percentage of Americans who are uninsured hit their
highest levels since 1999, the first year for which comparable data are
available, with 2.2 million more Americans — and 600,000 more children
— joining the ranks of the uninsured in 2006.
Today’s figures also show that while the
overall poverty rate declined slightly (from 12.6 percent to 12.3
percent) between 2005 and 2006, the decline was largely concentrated
among the elderly. The poverty rates for children and for working age
adults remained statistically unchanged as compared to 2005, and well above their levels in 2001, when the last recession hit bottom
Similarly, while median income rose
modestly (by 0.7 percent, or $356) for households in general, this
merely brought median income back to where it stood in the 2001
recession year. In addition, median income for working-age households — those headed by someone under 65 — remained more than $1,300 below where it stood when the recession hit bottom.

Earth is roughly 4.5 billion years old, but her early eons were tempestuous. Not even rock
survives from the first 500 million years of her life—an eon known as
the Hadean—because geologists speculate the planet's surface boiled and
bubbled with molten lava under a steady bombardment of comets and
meteorites. But tiny diamonds discovered in antediluvian zircon
crystals sprinkled in three-billion-year old rocks from Australia hint
that the planet's surface fire might have ceased much earlier than
previously believed.

Mineralogy graduate student Martina Menneken of the Westfälische
Wilhelms–University of Münster in Germany and her colleagues probed
1,000 of these ancient zircon crystals for inclusions—tiny outcroppings
of other minerals hidden in the unusually stable lattice. They
discovered diamonds of different shapes and sizes in 45 of the old
crystals by using a laser technique called Raman spectroscopy.

Lawrence A. Frolik, Professor of Law, University of Pittsburgh School of Law;Alison McChrystal Barnes, Professor of Law, Marquette University Law School

Elder Law: Readings, Cases, and Materials, Third Edition, 2007

A. Kimberley Dayton, Professor of Law, William Mitchell College of LawMolly M. Wood, Esq., Stevens & Brand, LLP, Lawrence, KSJulia Belian, Visiting Associate Professor of Law, University of Missouri at Kansas City School of Law

Elder Law: Selected Federal Statutes and Regulations, 2007 Edition

Lawrence A. Frolik, Professor of Law, University of Pittsburgh School of Law;Alison McChrystal Barnes, Professor of Law, Marquette University Law School

Elder Law: Statutes and Regulations, 2007

A. Kimberley Dayton, Professor of Law, William Mitchell College of LawMolly M. Wood Esq., Stevens & Brand, LLP, Lawrence KSJulia Belian, Visiting Associate Professor of Law, University of Missouri at Kansas City School

And feel free to contact me if you'd like a recommendation (ik, just kidding, Larry)...

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH FLORIDA SYMPOSIUM/CONTINUING PROFESSIONAL EDUCATION COURSE: "The Art of Medicine At The End Of Life," to be held Nov. 2, 2007 in New York, New York. For more information see: http://www.cme.hsc.usf.edu/artofmedicine/

UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON INSTITUTE ON AGING: "19th Annual Colloquium on Aging," to be held in Madison, Wisconsin, Oct. 18, 2007). For more information see: http://www.aging.wisc.edu/

California Governor Arnold Schwartzenegger used his line-item veto to cut a
funding increase of $12 million to Adult Protective Services, a
statewide program to protect elder and dependent adults from physical
abuse and neglect and financial abuse. “I know that this was a
tough budget year, but I cannot believe that the governor chose to
abandon the elderly and the disabled,” Lee Collins, director of the San
Luis Obispo County Department of Social Services, said in a statement. County APS investigators respond to 70 reports of abuse a month—up 45 percent from a year ago, according to Collins.

CBO
expects the 2007 deficit to total $158 billion--a $90 billion decline
from the deficit recorded for 2006. Nevertheless, the budget outlook
for the long term remains daunting, primarily because of rising costs
for health care.

Campaigners and drug makers failed last week in their High Courtbid to overturn guidance recommending only limited coverageon the NHS of drugs to treat Alzheimer's disease. This was thefirst major legal challenge to guidance issued by the NationalInstitute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), the bodythat recommends which drugs are available on the NHS in Englandand Wales. Mrs Justice Dobbs ordered NICE to amend the existing guidance,having ruled that its diagnostic criteria breached the DisabilityDiscrimination Act and the Race Relations Act. NICE undertookto make the relevant changes within 28 days—but the coreof the guidance will remain unchanged. The guidance recommends against the use of donepezil (Aricept),rivastigmine (Exelon), and galantamine (Reminyl) in patientswith mild to moderate Alzheimer's disease and against the useof memantine (Ebixa) in moderately severe to severe disease.

Probably not appropriate to the mission of the Law Professors Blog Network, but with the "baby " (Uncle Philip) among my father's eight siblings now eligible for Medicare, I guess it is close enough to "elder law" to include here: an account of the Dayton family reunion, which I missed this time, by my cousin Jim Bishop:

A similar scenario unfolded as descendants of the
late Robert P. and Rhoda Y. Dayton, my
maternal grandparents, held
another family gathering at this site the weekend of Aug. 4-5.A
good turnout — 112 out of a possible 147 relatives came from
Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, Ohio, North Carolina, and the
farthest came from Colorado. We represented a broad spectrum of ages,
occupations, special interests and travel experience as revealed in a
family directory assembled by cousin Linda Dayton Thompson.The Dayton homestead,
nestled in the heart of Fairview Valley in Mineral County, W.Va., looms
ahead, with its long red barn with white trim, Holstein cattle,
towering silos, rows of electric fence, everything in neat order and
inviting. I
regretted that my 85-year-old mom, Ann Dayton Bishop, oldest of the
nine Dayton siblings, wasn’t able to attend for physical reasons, but I
sensed her presence. The other lament: For myself, a family reunion is
over by the time things really get fired up. I determined to try to
talk with every person present, but fell miserably short.
The
last Dayton reunion, in 2002, opened with my Uncle Art Dayton
presenting a scroll that he had prepared and mounted on a wall. The
large parchment was a timeline with photographs of Dayton family
members no longer living — 11 in all — including Uncle Art’s son, Artie
Jr., who died in a car accident in 1983.

At an age close to 80 years
with a child of his already a lawyer, Pa Benedy Ogbole Igene has just
finished his first session second semester law examination. PAPA: That is his sobriquet among his peers. No other sobriquet appears more
apt. He is a Papa among other Papas and Mamas at the Ibadan Centre of
the National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN).
Though blessed with a boyish and sportsmanlike figure, both the centre
overseer, facilitators and other grandpa students call him Papa and bow
when greeting him. A close contact with him will show that, indeed, the
difference is clear. If former President Olusegun Obasanjo were to be
in his centre, he would have no option than to call him Egbon, meaning
elder.

His sojourn in life has not had much of pleasant
experiences. Rather, his life has been like someone who had his
umbilical cord tied to crises when coming to the world. Said he to
Mid-Week Tribune: “The period I was in my mother’s womb was a mystery.
I was born long before what doctors now call Expected Delivery Date
(EDD). When I was born, villagers who knew of my birth did not rejoice
with my mother. Some days after, some of them came to my mother and
asked Ogbole? meaning can he survive? Others called me Izagodo, meaning
empty vessel. For four months, I was not christened. My mother
addressed me as Omo, meaning my baby. It was when I grew up that my
mother told me all these.” In his resume, he has to his credit, so to
say, work experiences as a house boy, gardener, cook and shop sweeper
to mention a few. But he was resolute and dogged. “As a houseboy, I was
eager to go to college. When they sent me out to go and sell kerosene
or bread, I will stop at the market and help some women to sweep their
shops for a fee. I used this money to purchase form and wrote entrance
examination into Immaculate concession, Benin but I didn’t have money
to go for the interview. This propelled me to take a job at the
Ministry of Agriculture, Irrua as a general labourer for about three
years”, he recalled.

Canada's doctors are calling on the federal government to create new
legislation to ensure that prescription drugs, home care and long-term
care are publicly funded just like physician and hospital care. Brian Day, president-elect of the Canadian Medical Association, said
there is no question that many of these services are medically
necessary and should be covered by [Canadian] medicare. A poll commissioned by the CMA showed that many Canadians agree, and
see this expansion as a necessity. The survey found that only 55 per
cent of Canadians are confident they will have adequate savings to
afford their own long-term care. Those surveyed said that, should medicare be expanded, the priority
should be funding long-term care such as nursing homes, followed by
home care, prescription drugs, dental care and vision care. Dr. Day said the best way to modernize medicare would be to update
the Canada Health Act, the legislation that sets out the principles of
medicare. But delegates to the CMA meeting called instead for parallel
legislation to expand the scope of the Canada Health Act instead of
reopening the CHA itself.

Ed: As in most nations that have universal health care access, Canada does not currently treat long term care services as health care. Two important exceptions are Japan and Germany, both of which have adopted national long term care insurance programs to provide care for disabled seniors.

Debby, who lives in a rocky enclosure at Winnipeg's Assiniboine Park
Zoo, was recently named the world's oldest polar bear by Guinness World
Records. "We like to boast that we're the polar bear capital of the world,
with all of the polar bears up at Churchill and along the coast," said
zoo curator Bob Wrigley. At 40, Debby has doubled the life expectancy of most polar bears. In
the wild, the massive Arctic bears usually live about 20 years. Like many 40-year-olds, Debby likes her beauty rest. "She'd probably still be sleeping right now if I hadn't thrown some
food out," remarked zookeeper Harold Masters after tossing bread into
the bear's enclosure Friday.

Korbin Liu, 63, a health policy research associate at the Urban
Institute for more than two decades, died Aug. 12 of esophageal cancer
at Washington Home hospice. He lived in Washington. Dr. Liu was a nationally recognized expert on health care after acute hospitalizations and on Medicare and Medicaid coverage. His work focused on long-term-care services, and he studied the
likelihood of patients' entering nursing homes, the duration of their
stays and their risks of depleting personal resources and becoming
eligible for Medicaid coverage. At the time of his death, he was
working on a multiyear study to examine approaches to improving
Medicare payments for skilled nursing facilities.